What do you do if you want a deeper understanding of your health and how your body is aging?

If you are like a growing number of people, you subject yourself to a functional medicine panel of tests that requires so many vials of blood be drawn they put you in what is essentially an adult high chair in case you pass out. That’s where I found myself a few months back, looking anywhere other than at what the clinician was doing (there is a reason I never became a doctor other than my lousy AP Chemistry grade!)

We are putting more work than ever into understanding our health, even trying to “hack” our bodies to optimize everything from sleep to metabolism. We go through the needle sticks and waiting because we want to know where we are now, identify any unknown issues, and determine how we can prevent trouble in the future.

Benchmarking a wealth management business is similar in its intent and outcomes except for (we hope!) the happy absence of physical discomfort. In our work with owners of advisory firms, we find that both bad and good news shows up in key financial performance, pay, growth measures, and capacity ratios.

Just like health test results, sometimes what seems like good news on the surface isn’t really good news.

Let’s say you are a partner in a $750 million in AUM firm with an operating margin of 33%. It looks like you had a great year considering the long-term operating margin of firms has been around 25%. But in 2024, peer firms your size had an average operating profit margin of more than 47%. Suddenly, what seemed like a great result has been put in perspective, and you start asking deeper questions about where the money is going and what your growth looks like relative to your peers.

If you have tried to puzzle through the results of medical exams before talking with your physician, you have likely given up after trying to understand how something like iron saturation is different from iron binding capacity. Looking at benchmarking data for your firm is fortunately a lot less foreign for owners. However, you may come across ratios and comparisons and find you aren’t sure what they really mean for your business.

It turns out it helps to have some context along with your results. I found the narrative write-up of my functional medicine panels helped demystify a lot of the terms and numbers, and having a physician look at it and zero in on what mattered was a real relief. In my work with the owners of wealth management firms, I have found the same is true: we don’t just need the results, we need some perspective on what they mean.

If you are serious about working on your business, it starts with benchmarking, just like knowing what to do to improve your long-term health often starts with panels. There are a growing number of benchmarking studies clamoring for your attention, so how to decide which one(s) to participate in?

Naturally, we would like firms to participate in our own benchmarking study, but we want participants to understand why we believe they should consider it. Firms considering participating in the True Ensemble Data Insights should know:

• Every participating firm gets copies of two full reports: our growth and profitability and compensation studies
• Our reports offer not only all of the data you need to benchmark you firm’s growth, but also perspective on the trends we are seeing that will help you interpret results
• Our team has collectively been working on the leading wealth management benchmarking studies since the early 2000s—we have a great deal of context and deep familiarity with the numbers
• We believe creating a high-quality data set to help guide owners is critical to fostering a healthy independent wealth management industry and value the time you commit to contributing to this effort

So, if you want to see the diagnostics for your firm and not need another degree to decipher the results, join us in the True Ensemble Data Insights 2026, here.